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OpenMarket: August 2018

It was a slow news week on the policy front, though quite busy on the drama/soap opera front. The House was in recess, and while the Senate was in session, its business consisted mostly of lower court judicial nominations. The 2018 Federal Register passed the 40,000-page mark as agencies passed new regulations ranging from the pewter industry to pilot seats.

Joel Achenbach, a science and politics reporter, once asked why “many reasonable people doubt science.” He should look at his own reporting on alcohol research for the possible explanation. Despite decades of overwhelming evidence that moderate drinking confers health benefits, Achenbach’s August 3 Washington Post piece asserts that the evidence is “murky.” The basis for the assertion seems to come from a single study published in April in the journal...

As far as politicians’ transgressions go, I usually don’t get that riled up about hypocrisy. In the course of voting on and debating so many issues, lawmakers are bound to take some stances that are inconsistent with previous positions. Plus, I can respect a genuine change of mind and change of heart even if not explicitly acknowledged.

Our good friend Nick Gillespie interviews Peruvian economist and property rights activist Hernando de Soto about the future of prosperity in the developing world, and how legal reform can be the path to wealth for traditionally impoverished communities around the world.

Why do people trade with each other at all? Because it makes them better off. As Iain Murray’s and my paper “Traders of the Lost Ark” opens: “Imagine yourself on a tropical island. Plenty of sunshine, trees for shade, and beautiful white sand beaches all around. You have the whole place to yourself. This idyllic paradise would be one of the poorest places on Earth. Why? Because you would have no one to trade with.”

Yesterday, I addressed why last week’s court order calling for a ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos was both dangerous and wrongheaded. Today, we look at the details of another case that was also decided last Friday related to glyphosate, an herbicide used in Monsanto’s brand known as Roundup. In both cases, environmental activists (and trial lawyers in this particular case) have leveraged junk science to wrongly demonize products that farmers need to produce food.

Since a Republican majority was installed at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), labor unions and Democrats in Congress have lobbed baseless conflict of interest claims at members of the Board. This is a transparent effort to block the NLRB from issuing decisions that overturn Obama-era policies.

Last week was a bad one for farmers. Two legal decisions were released that promise to undermine access to valuable agrochemicals that farmers need to produce a safe and affordable food supply. Both of these decisions came about thanks to a series of lies, misinformation, and junk science peddled by environmental activists and trial lawyers.

In our new paper, “Traders of the Lost Ark,” my Competitive Enterprise Institute colleagues and I attempt to articulate a strong moral and economic case for free trade. Free trade has long been one of CEI’s core issues, and we felt it necessary to restate the case given current policy disputes. Those disputes, we believe, have lost sight of what trade is and why we engage in it, and in so doing will lead to the infringement of liberty and great economic harm.

Big government is crushing small business owners around the nation, punishing decades of hard work and job creation. Too few people speak up as the burdens of the regulatory and nanny states slam down upon them, but every now and then I hear from someone in trouble.